Beginner Editor Tasks
You've gotten familiar with d20db and want to help out. Awesome! Here are a few projects that are always in need of help. We have enough pages on the site, and new pages always being generated, that this work will be almost always available. These projects are on the easier side to do, so they're a great way to get your feet wet editing here at d20db. Once you're tired of these, jump up to Intermediate Editor Tasks. We've attempted to make this list in somewhat an order of difficultly (or knowledge of wiki-editing) so you can gauge your abilities as you work your way down the list. This is not in any way an inclusive list - if you see something else that needs to be done, just do it! Thanks for your help! Monster Editing There are several items with monsters that need regular attention. Feats, skills, spells etc This is a great place to begin editing wiki files. As you browse d20db monsters, look in the feats and skills sections. If they aren't already linked, make them a link. Do this by putting double brackets around them. Click the Edit tab on the top of the page and look for a line like: Feats: Cleave, Great Cleave, Power Attack and change it to look like: Feats: Cleave, Great Cleave, Power Attack The extra brackets will tell the system to make it a link. Hit Show Preview and make sure the links are showing up. If they are, click Save page. Do this with skills as well. There are some special skills and feats that deserve special mention. These are skills like Craft (Alchemy), or Weapon Focus (Longsword). These should only have the double brackets around the general skill name itself. Don't include the specialty. The example links should look like: Craft (Alchemy), or Weapon Focus (Longsword) Many monsters also have spell like abilities - Ogre, Mage for example. If you look at one of these monsters, the spells should each be linked as well. Spells have a little different standard. They are usually linked (like feats and skills) as well as in italics. The Ogre, Mage page started out looking like: Spell-Like Abilities At will—darkness, invisibility; 1/day— charm person (DC 14), ... and now look like: Spell-Like Abilities At will—''Darkness, ''Invisibility; 1/day— Charm Person (DC 14), ... Note that we added the linking double brackets, as well as two single quotes (those aren't regular double quotes on each side, they're two separate single quotes). Additionally, all of the spells entries capatalize their first characters, so we need to when linking to them. Once you're used to doing this in the monster statistics, you'll also notice skills and feats in the monster description that need links as well. If a skill or feat is listed multiple times in a section, only link the first mention of the item. Special abilities Many monsters have abilities that are common to many monsters. Darkvision, scent, and similar are abilities that many monsters have, and aren't detailed in the monster descriptions. If a monster has an ability like this, it should be linked, but only if there isn't a description of it later in the monster details. For instance , the Minotaur has several abilities. It orinally looked like: Special Attacks: Powerful charge 4d6+6 Special Qualities: Darkvision 60 ft., natural cunning, scent The special attacks list Powerful charge, which is detailed later in the Minotaur. Under special qualities, however, darkvision and scent aren't listed in the minotaur description. To be careful, we searched for Darkvision and Scent and found that both had their own page we could easily link to. Then we changed the Minotaur to: Special Attacks: Powerful charge 4d6+6 Special Qualities: Darkvision 60 ft., natural cunning, scent So those abilities can easily be accessed now. Monster Groups We're also trying to group monsters. See creating a monster group for how to do this. Find a set of similar monsters and group them together so others can easily navigate to similar monsters. Monster Organization In monster stat blocks, there's an entry called "Organization". This lists how the moster likes to travel - groups, packs, etc. Sometimes monsters travel with other monsters. See the entry for Giant, Cloud as an example. They sometimes are followed by griffons or dire lions. When this happens, it's nice to link these additional mosters to their respective monster entry. The Cloud Giant's entry originally looked like: Organization: Solitary, gang (2-4), family (2-4 plus 35% noncombatants plus 1 sorcerer or cleric of 4th-7th level plus 2-5 griffons or 2-8 dire lions), or band (6-9 plus 1 sorcerer or cleric of 4th-7th level plus 2-5 griffons or 2-8 dire lions) It's long and complicated, but all we care about here are the words griffons and dire lions as those are monsters that should be linked. To link them, we'll put brackets around them like we did with the skills and feats, but to make it more readable, we want to keep the same words as the entry already has. So in our example we want it to still just say "griffons" and "dire lions" even though the link to the monster needs to link to "Griffon" and "Dire Lion". Note the change in case, and the change in plurals. To do this, the entries should look like: dire lions and griffons Essentially, put the "real" link at the beginning, and then a pipe (|), and then what you want the link to display as. Easy! Our completed Could Giant example then looks like: Organization: Solitary, gang (2-4), family (2-4 plus 35% noncombatants plus 1 sorcerer or cleric of 4th-7th level plus 2-5 griffons or 2-8 dire lions), or band (6-9 plus 1 sorcerer or cleric of 4th-7th level plus 2-5 griffons or 2-8 dire lions)